The Retail Energy Industry is evolving so fast. Regulatory changes, customer preferences and new products just to name a few. One thing that never changes is the customer’s need for support and service. Getting a good price is not enough. But who does a Retail Energy Brokerage firm rely on to serve their end-use customer better? If your software provider or technology partner’s Customer Success team is not knowledgeable or unreliable, what impact does that have on your business?
In this article, you will learn about the 3 Reasons Why Retail Energy Brokerage Firms Choose Sparkplug:
1. Dedicated Customer Success Managers-
Our Customer Success Managers (CSM) have a combined 50+ years of serving retail energy brokerages and suppliers. We know Retail Energy. Yet, we remain humble and constantly listen to our customers to adapt our products to industry changes. For this reason, Customer Success is at the core of everything Enerex does as a company. Our purpose-driven strategy of “connecting people, through technology to increase trust in retail energy markets” has enabled our organization to become a retail energy leader in providing innovative solutions and the highest-quality of customer experience.
2. Our Customer Success is Driven by Process-
When it comes to building Software, each user’s experience can be different. And collecting feedback, prioritizing future enhancements, and making the product better, is what users come to expect from great software companies. With our embedded feedback tools in Sparkplug, quarterly surveys, and our Product Management Team’s bi-weekly release process – we can capture all our customer’s needs and collectively decide what features are being worked on.
Harvard Business Review stated that, 81% of customers prefer to try solving a problem on their own before contacting a customer support representative. Therefore, a robust Knowledge Base consisting of categorized support articles, Videos and FAQs become critical to a user’s overall success and satisfaction.
We understand that time is money, so for this reason, our CSMs have spent the last several months building a knowledge base that contains 75+ new knowledge base articles that can save you time if you run into any issues. These articles, tips, tricks and how-to videos are available at your fingertips and can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. Its quick and convenient – and fits your busy lifestyle.
Examples of articles include:
- Matrix Pricing Overview – takes you from setup to loading your own matrix files to seeing matrix pricing trends
- Collecting Historical Usage Overview – outlines all the different ways you can gather usage and then provides links to step-by-step instructions for each method.
Over the past 4 months, we have robustly focused on building out this tool in Sparkplug and our customers are loving it! Which leads to the final point – We do what we say we are going to do and measure it through statistics!
3. Customer Success Statistics – Measurability & Accountability-
If you can’t find a self-help article for your issues, then no problem. For times when you do need to contact the Customer Success Team, we are here for you!
We are increasing the percentage of one-touch tickets, reducing the time for the first response, and maintaining our high level of customer satisfaction. By using Zendesk for our support tickets, we are easily able to gather data analytics and observe trends.
- One-touch tickets are those tickets that are asked and answered with one response – one touch. As we build the knowledge base and provide links to that information to the CSM’s, they are increasingly able to provide quick responses to functionality questions. The one-touch tickets are trending upward – providing our customers with quicker responses.
- We have made significant improvements in the time to first response – cutting the response time in half since January! We have done that primarily by adding CSM’s to our Sparkplug staff. We are investing to provide our customers with the level of service they expect.
- When a support ticket is resolved, we ask our customers – “were you satisfied with the engagement and response?” We are proud that the percentage of satisfaction always hovers between 97 and 100%! The last two months, our customer satisfaction score has been 100%
